Last update: 2024-10-10
In philosophy, desert refers to the condition of being deserving of something, whether it is good or bad. This concept, often called moral desert, is closely associated with justice and morality. It suggests that good deeds should be rewarded and bad deeds should be punished (1 and 2). For example, if someone works hard and performs well, they might be said to deserve a reward, such as a raise or recognition. Conversely, if someone commits a wrongdoing, they might be said to deserve punishment. Desert is a normative concept, meaning it involves judgments about what is fair or right. It plays a significant role in discussions about justice, fairness, and moral responsibility.
In spite of its ubiquity, or perhaps because of it, the notion of desert is not especially well understood. This isn’t surprising, since there are many difficult questions surrounding desert. For instance, what are the ingredients (as it were) of desert? What sorts of thing can be deserving? What are the grounds or bases for desert? How do bases for desert manage to make a thing that has them deserving? What connections does desert have to other moral-normative concepts, such as justice and goodness? This article sketches some possible answers to these and subsidiary questions about desert.
Consider some ordinary desert claims:
These desert claims have several things in common: each involves a deserving subject (Hans, Nkechi, innocent victims), a deserved object (praise, promotion, compensation) and a desert basis (effort, contribution, innocent suffering). This suggests that desert itself is a three-place relation that holds among a subject, an object, and a basis. Of course, sometimes the desert claims we utter do not explicitly refer to all three of these ingredients. For example, one might say that Hans deserves praise (without specifying the basis of his desert), or that Nkechi is deserving (without specifying what she deserves). But unless one can fill these claims out further—say, by explaining why one thinks that Hans deserves praise, or what it is one thinks that Nkechi deserves—then the concept of desert is being misused.
Fully grasping a concept involves understanding its relationships to other concepts. Thus, in order to fully grasp the concept of desert, it’s important to see what connections it has to other concepts. Desert probably bears interesting connections to a large number of concepts, but this concluding section focuses only on four: justice, intrinsic value, entitlement, and responsibility.
There are many theories of justice (and, some would say, many sorts of justice—distributive, retributive, social, etc.—for there to be theories about). Some of these theories are egalitarian, since they state that some sort of equality is most central to justice. Other theories of justice are libertarian, because of the supreme importance that they place on liberty or freedom. But an ancient idea is that justice involves the getting of what’s deserved—even if this results in inequalities, and even if distribution according to desert involves or requires some loss of liberty. On an old-fashioned version of this view, for instance, justice obtains entirely to the extent that the morally virtuous are happy, and the morally wicked suffer. If happiness were somehow to be distributed according to moral goodness in this way, the result would be inequality with respect to happiness, since the more virtuous would be happier than the less virtuous. There would also be a loss of liberty or freedom for the morally wicked, since they would be punished or otherwise made to suffer. But these inequalities and losses of freedom wouldn’t detract from the justice of the world; instead, they would be required by justice itself.
The intrinsic value of a thing is the value it has simply in virtue of what it is, rather than the value it has in virtue of what it leads to, signifies, entails, purchases, and so on. (For reasons that can’t be discussed here, the concept of intrinsic value is of central importance in philosophical ethics.) The branch of ethics concerned with intrinsic value is known as axiology. A helpful assumption often made in axiology is that intrinsic value is had not just by anything at all, but rather by states of affairs or propositions. And one of the central questions in axiology is this: what elements can contribute to the intrinsic value of a state of affairs?
We often speak of being entitled to something, like a vacation, a grade, an inheritance, or an apology. Notice, however, that in many of these cases we could just as easily have said that we deserve these things. Thus, the terms ‘entitled to’ and ‘deserve’ are often used interchangeably. This raises the question of desert’s relationship to entitlement. Are they one and the same, or are they different? And if they are distinct notions, then what connection, if any, does desert bear to entitlement?
First, though, what exactly is entitlement? Reflecting on a few cases can bring out the sense of ‘entitlement’ of interest here. Suppose, then, that the rules of a certain corporation state that its employees shall receive two weeks of paid vacation after one year of full-time employment. Now suppose that an employee of the company has worked full-time for one year. This employee is now entitled to two weeks of paid vacation. Or, to take another example, suppose the rules of a certain board game specify that a player who rolls “snake eyes” must lose a turn. If a player now rolls snake eyes, then that player is “entitled” to lose a turn. (Admittedly, we don’t usually think of penalties as objects of entitlement, but, in the sense of ‘entitlement’ that concerns us, they can be.) Suppose, as a final example, that the accepted rules of etiquette state that the hostess of an upcoming dinner party shall receive RSVPs from her invited guests, even if she fails to request the favor of a response. In that case, the hostess is entitled to a response from all her invitees. These cases have several things in common. First, there is a conventional rule that specifies that a person shall receive a certain treatment in virtue of possessing an “entitlement base” (that is, a particular attribute or performance of a certain action). Second, there is a person who falls under the rule and who has the entitlement base. Third, this person thereby comes to be entitled to the treatment in question. These are paradigmatic cases of entitlement.
Clearly, entitlement thus understood is structurally similar to desert. For entitlement, like desert, is a three-place relation among an entitled subject, a basis of entitlement, and an object of entitlement. Also, as noted above, many objects of entitlement—vacations, punishment, replies to invitations—are also objects of desert. Furthermore, failure to treat in accordance with entitlement, like failure to treat in accordance with desert, can be an injustice. These considerations might lead some to conclude that there is a profound relationship between entitlement and desert.
Some might want to say that the relationship between desert and entitlement is extremely intimate. Indeed, the “institutional” theories of desert mentioned in Section 3 are precisely those that identify desert with some sort of entitlement. However, this proposed connection (identity) is a bit too intimate, for there are cases in which a person is entitled to something but doesn’t deserve it, and also cases in which what’s deserved isn’t something to which the person is entitled. For instance, the rules that govern the state lottery might entitle the winning ticket holder to one hundred million dollars, even if the lucky winner doesn’t deserve so much money. Or, it might be that everyone in the United States deserves free or affordable access to basic health care, even though there are no rules that entitle us to it. These cases suggest that if there is an interesting relationship between desert and entitlement, it isn’t identity.
At least some authors have claimed that although entitlement is not identical to desert, it is nevertheless a basis for desert (Feldman 1992, 1995a; McLeod 1999). On their view, being entitled to something is a basis for deserving it. Perhaps the main motivation for this position springs from combining the conviction that justice is simply the getting of what’s deserved with the apparent fact that failing to treat in accordance with entitlement can involve injustice. If this combination of views is correct, it would seem to follow that being entitled to something must be a basis for deserving it. But this view also suffers from serious problems. One is its implication that evil or morally repugnant rules are capable of generating desert. Suppose, for example, that Nazi laws entitled officers of the SS to property confiscated from Jews. Even so, it hardly seems correct to say that, in virtue of this, the Nazi officers came to deserve (even prima facie) the stolen property. Another problem with the view that entitlement is a basis for desert is that it seems to violate the requirement that a desert basis must be a fact about the deserving subject. Unlike the property of being morally virtuous or being lazy, the property of being entitled by the rules to x is a highly extrinsic property of an individual, and thus cannot count as a basis for desert.
A third proposed connection between desert and entitlement is found in Cupit (1996b). Suppose, for purposes of illustration, that the orchestra has just pulled off an electrifying performance of Dvorak’s Ninth Symphony. The musicians deserve the audience’s admiration, and there are rules for how it can be expressed. If, as in this case, their admiration is immense, then the rules call for a standing ovation. Put another way, there is a rule that entitles the musicians to a standing ovation from the audience. Thus, if the audience fails to give the orchestra a standing ovation, the message is conveyed that the musicians don’t deserve it. In other words, if the audience fails to give the players that to which they are entitled, then it fails to give them what they deserve. In this way, a link seems to be forged between desert and entitlement: the rules that generate entitlement also help to shape the meanings of the actions that fall under those rules; those actions are meant to express what the recipient deserves; therefore, failure to treat in accordance with entitlement can result in failure to treat in accordance with desert.
Much of the relevant literature presupposes or explicitly considers some conception of the relationship, if any, that desert bears to the concept of responsibility. As noted in Section 3, some authors (e.g., Rawls 1971, Rachels 1978, Pojman 1997) claim that desert always presupposes responsibility. On their view, one cannot deserve anything in virtue of an action or attribute for which one isn’t responsible. Feldman (1995a), Cupit (1996a, b), and others challenge this claim by pointing to properties that seem to be bases for desert but that do not presuppose responsibility. Innocent suffering, being a person, being beautiful, being a member of an endangered species - all of these properties are plausibly regarded as bases for desert of various forms of treatment, such as compensation, respect, admiration, protection, and so on, in spite of the fact that one need not be responsible for possessing them. Thus, it seems that if there is a desert-responsibility connection, it’s not as simple as some have thought.
Feldman, Fred and Brad Skow, “Desert”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2020 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2020/entries/desert/.